Display caption

This is one of a series of self-portraits that Warhol made in 1966–67, all based on the same photograph. His likeness remains recognisable but the image is painted in such a way as to minimise Warhol’s human qualities. His facial features, although always identifiable, also act as patterns of densely layered colour. Any expressive paint handling is suppressed by the silkscreened surface, reflecting Warhol’s self-proclaimed intention to ‘completely remove all the hand gesture from art and become noncommittal, anonymous’.

Andy Warhol had previously made an extensive series of similar but much smaller self-portraits in 1966-7 based on the same image, a photograph of himself by the photographer Rudolph Burkhardt. They measured 22 x 22in (56 x 56cm) and were all executed in different colour combinations. In his catalogue of Warhol's work, Crone lists no fewer than 54 versions. They have usually been exhibited in groups hung close together in a compact block, a method which calls attention to their similarities and differences as variations on a theme.

The Leo Castelli Gallery state that this series of larger and more monumental canvases 72 x 72in (183 x 183cm) was commissioned for the US pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, together with Jasper Johns's 'Map', Robert Rauschenberg's 'Green Shirt' and James Rosenquist's 'Fire Slide' among others. Although Crone only lists six paintings on this scale, not including this one, the Castelli records register eight, all different in colour. Two now belong to the Detroit Institute of Arts (not four, as stated by Crone), one to the Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst in Munich and another to the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Karl Ströher collection.

The US pavilion at Expo 67 was a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. The six Warhol self-portraits exhibited there were hung high up as a block (three rows of two) above the Johns map. A colour photograph of the installation, reproduced in the catalogue of the 1967-8 Boston exhibition, shows that the Tate's picture was on the right-hand side of the bottom row.

Published in:Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.759-60, reproduced p.759